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are a stranger in Chicago or San Antonio and you want to find the best Thai dish in town,
Foodspotting will guide you. If you happen to be in Baton Rouge, and want to try the Cajun
chicken, this app will show you a picture and tell you the place. It's aimed at items rather
than restaurants, and users provide photos of whatever they've found.
One could say that Andrzejewski's original vision was to bring together countless vis-
ions: photos of great food from all over the world. “Having a concrete vision helped me
attract my team in the first place,” Andrzejewski said at MX 2011. “This vision also attrac-
ted investors… I was able to come up with a concrete idea, articulate it, and see it realized.
I wanted to have an app that was a radar for food, so [users] could find good food any-
where.”
From the start, Andrzejewski wasn't shy about sharing her idea, and this open attitude
paid off. “Share your idea with anyone who will listen,” she advises, noting that anyone
who tries to steal your unique idea will also have to match all your work, research, fundrais-
ing and creativity in the development process. Encountering an idea thief who would have
the ability and motivation to do all that is rare. “Connecting is really the key to everything,”
she says.
Even before launch, Andrzejewski sent a version of Foodspotting to bloggers and others
in the media. Their reactions helped her and her team identify problems. Looking back at
her initial promotion effort, she feels she could've controlled her message better. There's
a tendency for ideas like hers to drift into a classification as a niche service for hardcore
foodies. But that threat never really manifested. Once people began to learn what she was
doing, interest exploded.
The Today Show
did a story, and the Travel Channel wanted to
work with her.
Not all designers are entrepreneurs, but the two often go together. The fact that Morin
and Andrzejewski were already designers has helped them and their startups achieve suc-
cess. Both are examples of the “do and check” paradigm. They began their designs, and
then tested them on the kind of people who would use them. Path did this by launching an
early version of their network. In retrospect, they knew this was really more like a rough
draft, but all the glitches in this earlier network informed their design of the next one.
Andrzejewski's process was similarly daring. Even before launch, she shared with anyone
who would listen, and then once she had a design, she let bloggers and others in the media
try it. She and her team looked at the feedback, and released a better product.
Andrzejewski is an example of a designer who has worked with well-known brands,
who then created her own brand with it's own theme and unique identity. Foodspotting is
far from being a household word, like Facebook or Google, but it is quickly carving a out
